As of September 30, there were ** law enforcement officers killed in the United States in 2024. Within the provided time period, the highest number of law enforcement officers killed in the United States was reported in 2021, at ** officers.

The killing of Tyre Nichols in January 2023 by Memphis Police Officers has reignited debates about police brutality in the United States. Between 2013 and 2024, over 1,000 people have been killed by police every year. Some of the most infamous examples include the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the shooting of Breonna Taylor earlier that year. Within the provided time period, the most people killed by police in the United States was in 2024, at 1,375 people. Police Violence in the U.S. Police violence is defined as any instance where a police officer’s use of force results in a civilian’s death, regardless of whether it is considered justified by the law. While many people killed by police in the U.S. were shot, other causes of death have included tasers, vehicles, and physical restraints or beatings. In the United States, the rate of police shootings is much higher for Black Americans than it is for any other ethnicity, and recent incidents of police killing unarmed Black men and women in the United States have led to widespread protests against police brutality, particularly towards communities of color. America’s Persistent Police Problem Despite increasing visibility surrounding police violence in recent years, police killings have continued to occur in the United States at a consistently high rate. In comparison to other countries, police in the U.S. have killed people at a rate three times higher than police in Canada and 60 times the rate of police in England. While U.S. police have killed people in almost all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, New Mexico was reported to have the highest rate of people killed by the police in the United States, with 8.03 people per million inhabitants killed by police.

The study was a comprehensive analysis of felonious killings of officers. The purposes of the study were (1) to analyze the nature and circumstances of incidents of felonious police killings and (2) to analyze trends in the numbers and rates of killings across different types of agencies and to explain these differences. For Part 1, Incident-Level Data, an incident-level database was created to capture all incidents involving the death of a police officer from 1983 through 1992. Data on officers and incidents were collected from the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data collection as coded by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. In addition to the UCR data, the Police Foundation also coded information from the LEOKA narratives that are not part of the computerized LEOKA database from the FBI. For Part 2, Agency-Level Data, the researchers created an agency-level database to research systematic differences among rates at which law enforcement officers had been feloniously killed from 1977 through 1992. The investigators focused on the 56 largest law enforcement agencies because of the availability of data for explanatory variables. Variables in Part 1 include year of killing, involvement of other officers, if the officer was killed with his/her own weapon, circumstances of the killing, location of fatal wounds, distance between officer and offender, if the victim was wearing body armor, if different officers were killed in the same incident, if the officer was in uniform, actions of the killer and of the officer at entry and final stage, if the killer was visible at first, if the officer thought the killer was a felon suspect, if the officer was shot at entry, and circumstances at anticipation, entry, and final stages. Demographic variables for Part 1 include victim's sex, age, race, type of assignment, rank, years of experience, agency, population group, and if the officer was working a security job. Part 2 contains variables describing the general municipal environment, such as whether the agency is located in the South, level of poverty according to a poverty index, population density, percent of population that was Hispanic or Black, and population aged 15-34 years old. Variables capturing the crime environment include the violent crime rate, property crime rate, and a gun-related crime index. Lastly, variables on the environment of the police agencies include violent and property crime arrests per 1,000 sworn officers, percentage of officers injured in assaults, and number of sworn officers.

In 2020, Brazil recorded over *** deaths of police officers. The following year the number fell to a total of ***. In 2024, the number increased to *** deaths. Moreover, during 2023, the number of people killed by police officers in Brazil registered a year-on-year decrease of nearly one percent points.

In 2023, the majority of law enforcement officers that were killed in the United States were white. That year, ** white law enforcement officers as well as **** Black officers were killed. Overall, a total of ** law enforcement officers were killed in the United States in that year.

Since the 1780s, over 25,000 United States law enforcement officers have died while on active duty, or due to injuries and illnesses obtained while on duty. Gunfire is responsible for over half of all total law enforcement deaths recorded, particularly before the 1930s. From this point on, the total share of gunfire deaths has decreased significantly, mostly due to the increase in vehicle or health related deaths, although gunfire has remained the most common individual cause of death in almost every year. Gunfire deaths These deaths rose steadily after the Civil War, and peaked at over 200 annual deaths during the 1920s, due to the increase in criminal activity during prohibition. Because of this, the National Firearms Act of 1934 was introduced in an attempt to reduce gun-related crime, by requiring the registration of any transfer of ownership and imposing a tax on gun manufacturers and distributors. After Prohibition's end and the introduction of these measures, annual law enforcement deaths from gunfire have been well below 100 in almost every year, except for a brief spike in the early 1970s, during the crime wave that began in the 1960s and the beginning of the "War on Drugs". Overall, gunfire deaths of law enforcement have fallen since the 1970s, reaching a low of just 34 deaths in 2013. In contrast, the total number of people killed by police shootings has consistently been above one thousand for most of the past decade.

Increase in health-related deaths

The majority of non-gunfire deaths are a result of vehicle-related accidents, and the number of crashes and accidents rose throughout the 20th century in line with the increase in car ownership. However, the number of deaths from heart attacks and job-related illness has also risen over time, due to the aging of the population and increasingly unhealthy lifestyle trends across the country. In recent decades, additional health issues have emerged that have had a disproportionate impact on law enforcement. In 2001, 72 officers died as a result of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and over 350 additional deaths have been attributed to the adverse health effects (primarily respiratory illnesses) sustained by first responders from law enforcement. From 2020-2022, COVID-19 became the largest single cause of law enforcement deaths. Figures relate to cases where the individual contracted COVID-19 while on duty, and highlights the increased exposure to the virus faced by those considered to be frontline or essential workers. This number is likely to fall in the future as infection rates fall and newer strains of the virus are less lethal.

For most of the last 35 years, the number of police officers who die on the job in the U.S. declined, but one grim statistic held steady: The most common cause of death was gun homicide. Those numbers grew significantly on Thursday night when five police officers were shot and killed at a demonstration in Dallas that was protesting recent killings by police officers in other states. President Obama called it “a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.” Per officer, policing had become even safer in recent years than the overall death counts suggest, which makes the Dallas shooting that much more of a singular, horrific massacre. That’s because the decline in the number of deaths by police officers in the line of duty has occurred as the number of officers has risen. The number of full-time, sworn local police officers increased by 35 percent from 1987 to 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. During that same period, the number of officers killed declined by 34 percent. 1 And a growing share of officer deaths are happening in accidental or deliberate car collisions.

In 2023, the most common circumstance a law officer was killed at the scene in the United States was during an investigative or enforcement assignment, such as for a drug-related matter, a wanted person, or a traffic violation stop. Within this year, ** law enforcement officers died under these circumstances. Another **** law enforcement officers died during a crime in progress, while ***** officers were killed while in pursuit. In total, ** law enforcement officers died were killed in 2023.

This data was obtained from https://mappingpoliceviolence.us/.

Mapping Police Violence is a 501(c)(3) organization that publishes the most comprehensive and up-to-date data on police violence in America to support transformative change.

This is a database set on openly sharing information on police violence in America.

Some information on this data according to their website: Our data has been meticulously sourced from official police use of force data collection programs in states like California, Texas and Virginia, combined with nationwide data from The Gun Violence Archive and the Fatal Encounters database, two impartial crowdsourced databases. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database.

We believe the data represented on this site is the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013. Note that the Mapping Police Violence database is more comprehensive than the Washington Post police shootings database: while WaPo only tracks cases where people are fatally shot by on-duty police officers, our database includes additional incidents such as cases where police kill someone through use of a chokehold, baton, taser or other means as well as cases such as killings by off-duty police. A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,100 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing work to end police violence in America.

In 2023, ** offenders who killed law enforcement officers in the United States were of an unknown race or their race was not reported to the FBI. ** white offenders and ** Black offenders also killed law enforcement officers in that year. From the total of known offenders that year, ** were male.

The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015 and 2016, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists frequently.

Any deaths arising directly from encounters with law enforcement will be included in the database. This will inevitably include, but will likely not be limited to, people who were shot, tasered and struck by police vehicles as well those who died in police custody. Self-inflicted deaths during encounters with law enforcement or in police custody or detention facilities will not be included.

The US government has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement. This lack of basic data has been glaring amid the protests, riots and worldwide debate set in motion by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. The Guardian agrees with those analysts, campaign groups, activists and authorities who argue that such accounting is a prerequisite for an informed public discussion about the use of force by police.

Contributions of any information that may improve the quality of our data will be greatly welcomed as we work toward better accountability. Please contact us at thecounted@theguardian.com.

CREDITS
Research and Reporting: Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, Jamiles Lartey
Design and Production: Kenan Davis, Rich Harris, Nadja Popovich, Kenton Powell

From 2010 to 2019, the number of male law enforcement officers killed in the United States has greatly exceeded the number of female law enforcement officers. In 2019, ** male law enforcement officers were killed while ***** female law enforcement officers were killed.

This data serves two primary purposes: (1) to report the number of employees in each law enforcement agency, categorized by sworn officers and civilian employees, as well as by sex; and (2) to track the number of officers assaulted or killed each month. Employee counts are reported annually, providing agency-level totals without intra-year fluctuations. Assault data includes details on shift type (e.g., alone, with a partner, on foot, in a vehicle), the offender’s weapon, and the type of call (e.g., robbery, disturbance, traffic stop). Fatality data distinguishes between felonious deaths (i.e., murders) and accidental deaths.

For a comprehensive guide to this data and other UCR data, please see my book at ucrbook.comVersion 12 release notes:Adds 2021 data.Version 11 release notes:Adds 2020 data. Please note that the FBI has retired UCR data ending in 2020 data so this will (probably, I haven't seen confirmation either way) be the last LEOKA data they release. Changes .rda file to .rds.Version 10 release notes:Changes release notes description, does not change data.Version 9 release notes:Adds data for 2019.Version 8 release notes:Fix bug for years 1960-1971 where the number of months reported variable was incorrectly down by 1 month. I recommend caution when using these years as they only report either 0 or 12 months of the year, which differs from every other year in the data. Added the variable officers_killed_total which is the sum of officers_killed_by_felony and officers_killed_by_accident.Version 7 release notes:Adds data from 2018Version 6 release notes:Adds data in the following formats: SPSS and Excel.Changes project name to avoid confusing this data for the ones done by NACJD.Version 5 release notes: Adds data for 1960-1974 and 2017. Note: many columns (including number of female officers) will always have a value of 0 for years prior to 1971. This is because those variables weren't collected prior to 1971. These should be NA, not 0 but I'm keeping it as 0 to be consistent with the raw data. Removes support for .csv and .sav files.Adds a number_of_months_reported variable for each agency-year. A month is considered reported if the month_indicator column for that month has a value of "normal update" or "reported, not data."The formatting of the monthly data has changed from wide to long. This means that each agency-month has a single row. The old data had each agency being a single row with each month-category (e.g. jan_officers_killed_by_felony) being a column. Now there will just be a single column for each category (e.g. officers_killed_by_felony) and the month can be identified in the month column. This also results in most column names changing. As such, be careful when aggregating the monthly data since some variables are the same every month (e.g. number of officers employed is measured annually) so aggregating will be 12 times as high as the real value for those variables. Adds a date column. This date column is always set to the first of the month. It is NOT the date that a crime occurred or was reported. It is only there to make it easier to create time-series graphs that require a date input.All the data in this version was acquired from the FBI as text/DAT files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. The FBI also provided a PDF file explaining how to create the setup file to read the data. Both the FBI's PDF and the setup file I made are included in the zip files. Data is the same as from NACJD but using all FBI files makes cleaning easier as all column names are already identical. Version 4 release notes: Add data for 2016.Order rows by year (descending) and ORI.Version 3 release notes: Fix bug where Philadelphia Police Department had incorrect FIPS county code. The LEOKA data sets contain highly detailed data about the number of officers/civilians employed by an agency and how many officers were killed or assaulted. All the data was acquired from the FBI as text/DAT files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. The FBI also provided a PDF file explaining how to create the setup file to read the data. Both the FBI's PDF and the setup file I made are included in the zip files. About 7% of all agencies in the data report more officers or civilians than population. As such, I removed the officers/civilians per 1,000 population variables. You should exercise caution if deciding to generate and use these variables yourself. Several agency had impossible large (>15) officer deaths in a single month. For those months I changed the value to NA. The UCR Handbook (https://ucr.fbi.gov/additional-ucr-publications/ucr_handbook.pdf/view) describes the LEOKA data as follows:"The UCR Program collects data from all contributing agencies ... on officer line-of-duty deaths and assaults. Reporting agencies must submit data on ... their own duly sworn officers feloniously or accidentally killed or assaulted in the line of duty. The purpose of this data collection is to identify situations in which

Context

This dataset provides information on violence in California's criminal justice system, whether the victim was a civilian or an officer or if the incident occurred during the arrest or while a subject was in custody. It's composed of a few related datasets:

• Use of force incidents: The use of force (URSUS) incidents that result in serious bodily injury or death or involved the discharge of a firearm are reported annually from LEAs and other entities throughout the state that employ peace officers. The URSUS data is narrowly defined and does not represent the totality of use of force incidents that occur in California. LEAs are only required to report use of force incidents that result in serious bodily injury or death of either the civilian or the officer and all incidents where there is a discharge of a firearm. As such, caution must be used when using the data for comparisons or in calculating rates.

• Law enforcement officers killed: Law Enforcement Officer's Killed or Assaulted (LEOKA) data are reported as part of the Federal Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program by LEAs throughout the state. LEOKA data are summary data, meaning it is a collection of information describing the totality of incidents, not a collection at the detailed, incident level. LEOKA is a federally mandated collection. From the 1960's until 1990, the CJSC did not retain any of the LEOKA data; the forms were passed along to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1990, the DOJ began to collect and retain the data from the LEOKA form for statistical purposes, but it wasn't until 2000, that full retention at the State level was defined and standardized.

• Death in Custody & Arrest-Related Deaths: State and local law enforcement agencies and correctional facilities report information on deaths that occur in custody or during the process of arrest in compliance with Section 12525 of the California Government Code. Contributors include: California law enforcement agencies, county probation departments, state hospitals, and state correctional facilities. Data are subject to revision as reports are received by the California Department of Justice (DOJ); figures in previous and current releases may not match.

• Citizens' Complaints Against Peace Officers: State and local law enforcement agencies that employ peace officers provide Citizens' Complaints Against Peace Officers (CCAPO) data via an annual summary. The information includes the number of criminal and non-criminal complaints reported by citizens and the number of complaints sustained. Assembly Bill 953 (2015) modified the reporting requirements to expand the types of findings and also include complaints based upon racial and identity profiling claims. 2016 was the first year of collection under the new reporting requirements.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was made available by the state of California's open justice program.

Photo by Meric Dagli.

Financial overview and grant giving statistics of Detroit Police Officers Death Benefit Plan

A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices. County-specific relative risk outcomes of being shot by police are estimated as a function of the interaction of: 1) whether suspects/civilians were armed or unarmed, and 2) the race/ethnicity of the suspects/civilians. The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more. Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.

In 2022, a total of 226 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in the United States. This is a significant decrease from the year before, when 458 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in the United States.

In 2023, the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo combined concentrated nearly half of the number of police officers killed in Brazil, with 36 and 25 deaths, respectively. Further, about 173 police officers were killed in Brazil in 2022.

Abstract (en): For any questions about this data please email me at jacob@crimedatatool.com. If you use this data, please cite it.Version 7 release notes:Add data from 2018Version 6 release notes:Adds data in the following formats: SPSS and Excel.Changes project name to avoid confusing this data for the ones done by NACJD.Version 5 release notes: Adds data for 1960-1974 and 2017. Note: many columns (including number of female officers) will always have a value of 0 for years prior to 1971.Removes support for .csv and .sav files.Adds a number_of_months_reported variable for each agency-year. A month is considered reported if the month_indicator column for that month has a value of "normal update" or "reported, not data."The formatting of the monthly data has changed from wide to long. This means that each agency-month has a single row. The old data had each agency being a single row with each month-category (e.g. jan_officers_killed_by_felony) being a column. Now there will just be a single column for each category (e.g. officers_killed_by_felony) and the month can be identified in the month column. This also results in most column names changing. As such, be careful when aggregating the monthly data since some variables are the same every month (e.g. number of officers employed is measured annually) so aggregating will be 12 times as high as the real value for those variables. Adds a date column. This date column is always set to the first of the month. It is NOT the date that a crime occurred or was reported. It is only there to make it easier to create time-series graphs that require a date input.All the data in this version was acquired from the FBI as text/DAT files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. The FBI also provided a PDF file explaining how to create the setup file to read the data. Both the FBI's PDF and the setup file I made are included in the zip files. Data is the same as from NACJD but using all FBI files makes cleaning easier as all column names are already identical. Version 4 release notes: Add data for 2016.Order rows by year (descending) and ORI.Version 3 release notes: Fix bug where Philadelphia Police Department had incorrect FIPS county code. The LEOKA data sets contain highly detailed data about the number of officers/civilians employed by an agency and how many officers were killed or assaulted. All the data was acquired from the FBI as text/DAT files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. The FBI also provided a PDF file explaining how to create the setup file to read the data. Both the FBI's PDF and the setup file I made are included in the zip files. About 7% of all agencies in the data report more officers or civilians than population. As such, I removed the officers/civilians per 1,000 population variables. You should exercise caution if deciding to generate and use these variables yourself. Several agency had impossible large (>15) officer deaths in a single month. For those months I changed the value to NA. See the R code for a complete list. For the R code used to clean this data, see here. https://github.com/jacobkap/crime_data.The UCR Handbook (https://ucr.fbi.gov/additional-ucr-publications/ucr_handbook.pdf/view) describes the LEOKA data as follows:"The UCR Program collects data from all contributing agencies ... on officer line-of-duty deaths and assaults. Reporting agencies must submit data on ... their own duly sworn officers feloniously or accidentally killed or assaulted in the line of duty. The purpose of this data collection is to identify situations in which officers are killed or assaulted, describe the incidents statistically, and publish the data to aid agencies in developing policies to improve officer safety."... agencies must record assaults on sworn officers. Reporting agencies must count all assaults that resulted in serious injury or assaults in which a weapon was used that could have caused serious injury or death. They must include other assaults not causing injury if the assault involved more than mere verbal abuse or minor resistance to an arrest. In other words, agencies must include in this section all assaults on officers, whether or not the officers sustained injuries." Law enforcement agencies in the United States.Smallest Geographic Unit: Police agency jurisdiction